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Readers Feast On Snackable Novellas

For the second year in a row, a study of Smashwords sales data has shown that longer self-published books sell better than shorter ones. They “found definitive evidence that ebook readers […] overwhelmingly prefer longer books over shorter books”, and that the average length of a book in the top 100 was 115,000 words.

“For some readers, it’s always been the case [that longer books are better],” says science fiction, fantasy and horror publisher Jo Fletcher. “There have always been readers who like a big story, who want a series that goes on for 13 books, and who don’t want the story to end. But I don’t think that’s forcing out anything. Just because [some] readers want something big and chunky that goes on forever, doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for something like Sarah Pinborough’s Language of Dying, which is a small but perfectly formed novella.”

One barrier between writers/publishers and readers is that it’s very hard to get a traditional book reviewers to look at an ebook, let alone a digital novella. Jeff Noon, author of SF classics Vurt and Pollen, struggled to get newspapers to review his new novella, Channel SK1N, which he self-published as an ebook.

“We got really good reviews from the on-line blogs and SF reviews sites,” Noon says. “One consequence we didn’t see coming was that the national newspapers really have very little interest in the e-book. So we received not a single review from a newspaper. Which was upsetting, and made life difficult. It’s madness. Surely they can review e-books in the same was as they review paperbacks? They will take a time to catch up, I guess. It’s very much a tiered system, at the moment, as it ever was: hardbacks, paperbacks, and e-books at the bottom.”

Publishers have also had problems positioning novellas, says author James Everington, which may have had an impact on how readers think about them. It’s not that readers don’t understand the concept of the novella, he says, but that shorter works are often presented poorly.

“Before ebooks there was a bit of confusion over how to sell novellas,” he says. “As standalone books? Tagged onto the end of a short story collection? As a collection of novellas, like Stephen King’s Different Seasons? Now, with ebooks, it’s a lot easier, and I think people will get used to the idea that stories work best at different lengths.”

Zombie romance author Isaac Marion, writer of Warm Bodies and prequel novella The New Hunger, thinks that readers are actually much more flexible than publishers assume.

“I really don’t think readers care,” he says. “Most readers don’t even know what the term ‘novella’ means. They just see a short book. At worst they think, ‘This better be a few bucks cheaper than Infinite Jest.’ At best they think, ‘Thank God this isn’t as long as Infinite Jest.’ I think the stigma against novellas is largely invented by the publishing industry itself because of petty squabbles over slightly smaller profit margins.

“I plan to talk about The New Hunger as a novel. I’ll describe it as a shorter, simpler kind of novel, but it’s the length it needed to be and I’m just as proud of it as I am of any longer work. I say stop segregating everything into subgenres and subformats and just let readers read what they want to read.”

“Having found a way to make the novellas look beautiful,” she says, “people have been reading them and saying, ‘This is great, this is quick and easy to read, and I really want the next one.’ It’s great if you’re reading it digitally,

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It seems that a lot of publishers are just shooting themselves in the foot. It seems from your post that readers don’t care about what they’re reading so long as it’s good and probably cheap, er, competitive, as well. Authors would do better to put their novellas out themselves; if publishers aren’t interesting in those minimal profits I’ll take ‘em.

I think that it’s likely going to be more cost effective for authors to put novellas out themselves because they really can keep costs down. Publishers have some built-in costs that are hard to reduce without totally reconfiguring how they work (which is unlikely), so that means they really can only go the luxury route if they want to break event. Of course, they could do it as a loss leader, but I suspect they feel that they already have too many of those in their full length novel output.

been enjoying your series of posts on shorter fiction, hope you’ll continue coverage of the topic going forward – was surprised and pleased to see a kinda rebuttal to smashword’s longer (only) sells best

though i’m working on the longest work yet for me, it’s inbetween a novella and two handful of short stories i’ve enjoyed creating immensely, and have a couple more short works in the plans once this “big one” is done ;-)

i like the idea most, i think, of being able to let a work “be” the size it’ll be, short or long; and i’m finding lots of good things about both formats; but letting a work be organic to itself, has been the biggest challenge, and greatest reward, so far

Couple of things on Smashwords’ data: Firstly, they aren’t clear on whether they are looking at $sales or number of units shifted. If they are talking about the dollar value of sales, then their conclusion is weak because a lot of novellas are priced free, so they won’t appear on that chart. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are unpopular. Equally, if novellas are priced pro-rata, eg a 30,000 word novella is priced at about a third of what a full novel would be priced at, then you’d have an income from your novella of one third that of your novel given the same units shifted, but it doesn’t mean that readers preferred the novel to the novella. Secondly, buying longer books doesn’t mean readers prefer longer books. It may just be that there simply are more long books than short, or that more established writers are writing longer books and inevitably selling more, whilst new authors are producing shorter ones and selling less because they are unknown. You have to control for variables to get a definitive result with this sort of analysis and I’m not sure they have.

I didn’t dig into these issues in the article because I didn’t want to get side-tracked, but without access to the underlying data and analysis I take those conclusions with a pinch of salt.

possibly, also, longer works are, even in the digital realm, less costly in terms of upkeep, bandwidth, etc, and thus even in this realm, there’s an incentive to get authors to produce certain types of work

i don’t know, but that “pinch of salt” re the conclusions, sometimes brings out thoughts about other reasons :-)